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I think I may have made a mistake when migrating my DreamHost registered domain to Amazon's Route 53 service. I didn't modify the DNS settings on DreamHost's end during the migration. So now, my DreamHost DNS panel says the following:

Change mikaelhartoft.com's whois nameservers
To modify your domain's whois information, please visit the registrar you registered mikaelhartft.com with (looks like it's not us!)

Even though the domain is originally registered with them. Now Route 53 has (apparently) completely taken over the domain, and I have the following delegation set:

ns-567.awsdns-06.net
ns-1362.awsdns-42.org
ns-387.awsdns-48.com
ns-1717.awsdns-22.co.uk

But, I also get the following message:

Before the Domain Name System will start to route queries for this domain to Route 53 name servers, you must update the name server records either with the current DNS service or with the registrar for the domain, as applicable.

Amazon does their domain stuff through Gandi, but I am not given a handle to log in to their service. So who is this "registrar" the message tells me about? Is it Amazon or Dreamhost?

At the moment, if I whois mikaelhartoft.com I get the following nameservers:

ns1.dreamhost.com
ns2.dreamhost.com
ns3.dreamhost.com

What to do?

EDIT added actual domain name (mikaelhartoft.com)

Mikael Andersen
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1 Answers1

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The registrar is the party who the domain has been registered through. Essentially they are the ones who filed the registration information and who ensure that the customer can delegate the domain name to their desired nameservers.

A registrar does not need to run any nameservers at all, so looking at the nameserver names is not generally a good way of determining who the registrar is.

whois will however tell you who the registrar is and in this case there is, in addition to information about the registrar, also a reseller specified:


$ whois mikaelhartoft.com
[Querying whois.verisign-grs.com]
[Redirected to whois.gandi.net]
[Querying whois.gandi.net]
[whois.gandi.net]
Domain Name: mikaelhartoft.com
Registry Domain ID: 1777474139_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
Registrar WHOIS Server: whois.gandi.net
Registrar URL: http://www.gandi.net
Updated Date: 2014-11-01T20:42:45Z
Creation Date: 2013-01-31T10:27:54Z
Registrar Registration Expiration Date: 2016-01-31T10:27:54Z
Registrar: GANDI SAS
Registrar IANA ID: 81
Registrar Abuse Contact Email: abuse@support.gandi.net
Registrar Abuse Contact Phone: +33.170377661
Reseller: Amazon
Domain Status: clientTransferProhibited
...

That is, the registrar in your case is Gandi but if it is their reseller Amazon that you have an existing business relationship with you will likely want start by to contact Amazon.

Håkan Lindqvist
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    And that closes the "noone takes responsibility for it" because it is quite clear who is responsible. – TomTom Nov 02 '14 at 18:06